New users often decide whether to continue with a product or abandon it in a matter of seconds. Savvy companies that understand this also understand that focusing on new user onboarding is the best way to make those pivotal first few seconds count.

Onboarding is more than just providing users with a series of tooltips. It’s providing an ecosystem that gets customers experiencing value in your product as soon as possible.

Because you’re looking at Helphero alternatives, it’s clear that you value creating a fantastic onboarding experience for your users. We’ve curated a list of alternatives that focus on the entire onboarding experience to convert new users into sticky users. We’ll present the alternatives in a few different categories based on how well they fill the gaps unfilled by Helphero.

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Helphero: Features, Pricing & Limitations

If you are already familiar with the features, pricing, and limitations of Helphero, feel free to skip this section and jump right into the alternatives. If not, we’ll give you a brief overview.

HelpHero Features

Helphero is a SaaS company that lets you create product tours to onboard your users more effectively.

Its main features include:

1. No-code product tour creation and editing
2. Checklists to guide new users during onboarding
3. In-app hotspots for on-demand contextual hints
4. Analytics to measure and optimize performance

HelpHero Pricing

HelpHero pricing is solely based on your application’s monthly active users (MAU), with subscription price increases that grow as your MAUs cross the following thresholds:

Similar to other SaaS companies, they incentivize users to purchase in yearly increments by giving a 17% discount, equivalent to 2 months free when compared to the monthly price.

HelpHero Limitations

HelpHero’s low prices for small businesses with less than 1,000 MAUs make it an attractive option when looking for software for product tours and user onboarding. But often with lower prices come limitations to the product solution.

Below are a few of the main limitations of Helphero:

• The features for building a new user onboarding flow enable a linear path with minimal capabilities to branch from the main flow.
• The onboarding features have limited options for interactivity beyond just text copy and buttons.
• The flow doesn’t allow for users to drill into specific issues or questions they have during the onboarding experience.
• The MAU-focused pricing means you pay for a lot of active users who don’t actually interact with the product tours and onboarding you build with Helphero.

6 Best HelpHero alternatives to fill in the gaps

Now to the main feature. We’ve curated a list of 6 HelpHero alternatives, focusing on those that plug the holes in its solution.

Instead of just presenting all the alternatives in a list and discussing their pros and cons, we’ll list the alternatives according to the following categories:

• Best overall alternative
• Best free alternative
• Honorable mentions

1. Stonly — Best Helphero alternative

Stonly is the best alternative to Helphero if you’re looking to give customers the guidance they need to achieve their version of success within your product.

One of the biggest problems with onboarding tools is that users have different goals and objectives for using your product. Funneling users through a one-size-fits-all onboarding experience doesn’t help many users with their specific goals.

Some tools try to implement a data-driven approach for customizing the onboarding experience, but this is often problematic when you don’t have much data about new users. Stonly’s onboarding process puts the customer in charge of their onboarding experience to ensure they get their particular questions answered.

Stonly excels at creating interactive experiences for customers that feel more like a conversation than a linear set of steps to follow. Its set of interactive guides, and powerful no-code widget makes it easy to give users choices to give them an onboarding experience tailored to their specific needs and intent.

If users have questions and want to dig in more on a particular topic at any point in the onboarding process, they can easily navigate to an easy-to-navigate knowledge base with interactive guides. Stonly makes it easy to build a beautiful, effective knowledge base, and to customize the look and feel to perfectly fit your aesthetic.

Pricing
Stonly is priced based on views, so you only pay for the value you get. Plans start at $60 a month.

Stonly’s key features:

• Powerful, easy-to-build product tours and walkthroughs
• Onboarding checklists for your users to keep them on track
• Trigger experiences with no-code hotspots, tooltips and banners
• Customize to match your style and branding with a simple UI and CSS styling
• Modular design to deploy whole guides or individual steps
• Data integrations to segment users and deliver individualized steps
• Custom contact forms to allow users to seamlessly raise their hands for help

Try Stonly for free, or schedule a demo with our sales team here.

2. Pendo

Pendo is a tool that focuses on improving new-user onboarding and increasing product engagement through its in-app guides.

Pendo’s in-app guides lack the interactivity and flexibility of the other alternatives mentioned, but it’s one of the only Helphero alternatives that has a completely free plan. Its free plan includes simple product analytics and linear in-app tooltips for up to 1,000 MAUs.

Pendo’s free plan key features:

• Support up to 1,000 MAUs
• Basic product analytics dashboard
• Simple, linear in-app guides builder
• API key for 1 web and 1 mobile instance

3. Appcues

Appcues is a product adoption platform focused on delivering no-code solutions to onboard and activate users.

Appcues offers a no-code editor to build personalized and customized product walkthroughs for new users. Appcues has a clean and simple design that is easy to match with your branding. But the product walkthroughs still primarily default to a linear path.

Pricing

Appcues pricing caters toward larger customers, with its lowest-end offering starting at $299/mo for up to 2,500 MAUs and scales up from there. Its growth tier caps at 20,000 MAUs for $1,399/mo paid annually before getting into enterprise pricing.

Appcues’ key features

• No-code tooltip and product walkthrough creator
• Library of out-of-the-box templates to choose from
• Targeting features for disengaged users or other specific segments

4. Userpilot

Userpilot is a product engagement platform that focuses on helping first-time users take key actions to become activated in your product.

Userpilot’s solution is simpler than many of the other alternatives, consisting mostly of a welcome message with a checklist of tooltips. Its main emphasis is on creating specific flows that target specific user personas. This is a good option if you have a lot of data about tour different personas. But this often isn’t the case when dealing specifically with new users.

Pricing

Userpilot’s pricing is very similar to Appcues, starting at $299/mo for up to 2,500 MAUs for growth companies and $749/mo paid annually for enterprise. Its pricing scales with additional MAUs, but it doesn’t make the increase transparent through its website.

Userpilot key features:

• Onboarding flow builder tailored to different personas
• No-code tooltip and in-app hints creator
• Checklists for users to follow linear onboarding flow
• Analytics and funnel conversions dashboard

5. Userguiding

Userguiding is a software platform focused solely on making user onboarding easy, with plans that cater to smaller companies as well as mid-size and enterprise.

Userguiding implements a set of features to build new user onboarding and product walkthroughs, including tooltips, hotspots, checklists, and segmentation. Similar to the other honorable mentions, it emphasizes a linear path with some customization for segments, depending on the data that you have.

Pricing

Pricing starts at $99/mo for up to 2,500 MAUs for the starter plan and $399/mo for up to 20,000 MAUs for the professional plan, which makes it less expensive than the other honorable mentions.

Userguiding key features:

• No-code product walkthrough tooltip and guide creator
• NPS survey tool to measure feature performance
• Analytics dashboard with goal and conversion tracking

6. Intercom

Intercom’s Product Tours feature allows for inserting prompts and video tours to guide new users to get the most out of your product.

While the main tooltip experience defaults to a linear onboarding path, combining the product tours feature with Intercom’s messenger gives a level of choice and flexibility to allow the user to deviate from the default path if needed. Additionally, Intercom facilitates adding video tooltips within the app to encourage engagement.

Check out this guide to see additional alternatives to Intercom.

Pricing
Intercom doesn’t broadly expose its pricing so it’s difficult to compare but is known for being high and confusing. The minimum pricing displayed on their website is the starter package of $67/mo billed annually with a $199 add-on for the product tours feature. This gives you one seat and 1,000 people reached per month through Intercom tools. Additional seats are $19/mo each and each additional 1,000 people reached is $50/mo.

Intercom’s Key features

• Code-free product tour builder
• Audience targeting through aggregating user data
• Multipage tour options with click to advance tooltips
• Video-based guides
• Reporting and analytics to measure engagement

Related Post: 8 Document360 Alternatives to Level Up Your Self-Service

Conclusion

Recent research has found that 82% of companies report that retaining customers is less expensive than acquiring new customers. Don’t squander your first impression with a new user.

Stonly gives you the tools to create an interactive onboarding experience that puts your customers at the controls. Instead of forcing customers through a linear pre-defined onboarding path, allow them to find the path that best fits their specific needs. Combining Stonly’s interactive guides with its no-code widget helps customers get the help they need, when and where they need it to make them more sticky.

Looking for a Helphero alternative to fill the gaps?
Stonly helps you build in-context knowledge bases that your customers will actually use.
Start a FREE Trial